Letter To Mr. President
Your Excellency,
On behalf of all Nigerians, I salute you, sir.
Within the yr 2002, I used to be an emissary of former President Olusegun Obasanjo GCFR. I used to be head of a delegation that was despatched with letters to 4 Presidents on the West Coast of Africa.
At every of the nations’ capitals my contingent and I had been properly obtained and lavishly feted.
Once we met with the President of Ghana on the time, John Kofi Agyekum Kufour, his reward for the function and management of Nigeria in Africa was inspiring. When Nigeria coughed, he mentioned, the remainder of West Africa caught chilly. What Nigeria needed within the sub-region, Nigeria received!
It’s common information that Nigeria had fought many wars and spent fortunes to guard and assist a number of African nations, and to maintain the hearth of unity and collaboration within the continent burning.
For many years, the entire of West Africa regarded in direction of Nigeria’s management to develop extra quickly, take away the final vestiges of colonialism and get rid of the political, social and cultural variations between the nations.
President Obasanjo’s letter was to introduce to the 4 different leaders a worldwide occasion that might contain and affect the complete area, and not directly implement the first objectives of ECOWAS – 15 West African nations working as a group with out restrictive borders, with a typical forex, a typical airline, a typical visa, a typical safety equipment, a typical market, a superhighway and a rail system working throughout the area from Dakar within the West to Calabar within the East, principally alongside a losing shoreline, all 3000 miles of it.
It was an amazing undertaking that might have created eight years of unprecedented collaboration, growth and an financial increase pushed by soft-power instruments – Sport, tradition and leisure.
The easy plan was for West Africa to collectively host a scheduled international occasion that might facilitate, catalyse, speed up and implement the implementation of the ECOWAS imaginative and prescient, a most bold infrastructural, financial, social and cultural growth in West Africa to be led by Nigeria.
It was an ingenious plan.
It didn’t see the sunshine of day, nevertheless, solely and just because it was ‘too good to be true’. Many in positions of authority under-estimated (and plenty of nonetheless do) the facility of sentimental energy instruments like sport, music and movie to realize what has eluded many generations of West African political juggernauts with their restricted appreciation and exploitation of soft-power diplomacy instruments for many years until now.
To this point, the dream of a purposeful and productive financial group of West African States has remained a undertaking in ‘sluggish movement’. The area’s historical past is affected by ‘weak’ leaders laden with the ‘rubbish’ of colonialism that cripples concepts helpful to the folks, limits the facility of governments, and retains the folks wallowing in poverty within the midst of a lot.
To succeed, ECOWAS would all the time want a visionary and brave Nigerian chief to pilot it. Why Nigeria? Nigeria has been the key nation within the area with all of the important components (sources, inhabitants, capability, and so forth) to guide the physique and kick-start a real cultural and financial renaissance.
In 2002, President Olusegun Obasanjo was ‘bought’ the concept of what a soft-power device, soccer, might do however he stepped away from all of it on the final minute for different political expediencies on the time, and conceded the bid to host the primary soccer World Cup to be held in Africa to South Africa. That’s how ECOWAS misplaced a golden alternative to realize the goals of its founding fathers by means of sport. West Africa, not South Africa, ought to have hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2010.
Immediately, the transformations ongoing in Morocco and in a number of elements of the Center East, largely pushed and fueled by sport, is a transparent testimony to Sport being a strong device for the event.
My President, I’m drawing your consideration to that incident in 2002 as a result of you’re the present Chairman of ECOWAS, at a time when the organisation faces an existential menace, desperately searching for a brave and visionary chief to steer it away from the precipice.
Some months in the past, three member States of ECOWAS, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, shockingly introduced their withdrawal from the physique.
Sadly, when Nigeria coughs lately, not many nations within the sub-region nonetheless catch the chilly an infection. The nations have disregarded all of the threats to ‘take care of them’ with none consequence in sight. It’s a main set again for Nigeria in lots of ways in which I gained’t go into right here.
Nevertheless, Africa is watching to see what ECOWAS, beneath you, will do to woo again the indignant renegade States, and put together the sub area to affix the remainder of the continent that should come collectively as a typical entrance, or perish, in an rising new World Order.
The implication of the breakup of ECOWAS is simply too dire for the Black particular person on earth to even ponder. The spirit of over 6 million folks from West Africa that had been bought into slavery have to be quivering of their graves. In different for his or her descendants to ‘return’ to their roots, West Africa should unite and be part of the military of a brand new, Black and African consciousness and civilization in a brand new World Order of issues.
Now, the sub-region has been thrown right into a state of confusion, and the long run appears to be like very unsure. All of this, beneath your Chairmanship of ECOWAS.
It’s apparent that Nigeria’s days of an industrial and navy energy in Africa are gone, most likely, without end. So, the time to be ingenious and to give you new concepts to decelerate the slide of ECOWAS into anomie is right here.
Chances are you’ll not understand it, Mr. President, however a very unrelated growth is demonstrating your capability as a person of braveness and imaginative and prescient.
You’re, certainly, a person of unusual braveness to have taken on the development of the Calabar to Lagos coastal superhighway, regardless of the legion of Nigerians berating you for what they see as wasteful and pointless right now. At the same time as I might also share a bit of of such sentiments due to how the complete undertaking was embarked upon, I can see, beneath the floor of issues, a broader image of the massive potentialities and alternatives that the undertaking presents, principally that of a big street undertaking that, if expanded as envisioned within the ECOWAS grasp plan, will develop into the ‘first mile’ in a journey that might traverse the 3000 miles of, hitherto, losing shoreline of West Africa, and create the largest shoreline financial system on this planet. That street can prolong and run from Calabar to Dakar!
I drove from Lagos to Abidjan simply over a yr in the past and may testify to that chance if solely ECOWAS doesn’t disintegrate. That’s, presently, a knotty and aggravating problem for you, I do know.
Moreover no matter else you could be doing now to facilitate the fast return of all of the renegade members again into ECOWAS, you could wish to be excited by additionally what the Nigerian Institute of Worldwide Affairs, NIIA, is placing up quickly, an mental discourse to revisit 2002 – a plan to deploy mushy energy diplomacy instruments to revive and revamp the unique spirit of ECOWAS in a Friendship Video games amongst all of the nations in West Africa.
This can present a interval of sports activities, tradition, leisure and an mental colloquium that can ease tensions, carry the ‘household’ of ECOWAS collectively once more, and use that to begin a therapeutic course of.
The place weapons, threats and politics have failed, Sport can present a soothing balm to thaw strained relationships, carry the fighters to the dialog desk.
Give it some thought, Sir – a West African Friendship Video games for the youths as one of many instruments to rescue ECOWAS.
I thanks, Sir, for taking the time to learn by means of my lengthy however humble ‘sermon’.
Your humble topic.
